Bullies, harsh teachers, vicious dogs–the pastoral British countryside is a much tougher place than ten-year-old city boy Peter thought it would be. Weirder, too–there are odd shopkeepers in the village, strange hermits living in the woods, and a man known as Scarecrow Man, who stands silently in the fields along Everlasting Lane looking up at the sky. Peter’s grieving mother has gone strange, too. In the new cottage where, after the death of his father, she’s moved them both from London, she seals off an upstairs room and forbids Peter from ever entering it. Somehow, he senses the locked room represents something that troubles his mother even worse than the death of his father–but what? It isn’t until he befriends the other school outcasts–the too-smart-for-her-own-good tomboy, Anna-Marie, and overweight Tommie–that Peter begins to think he has a fighting chance of getting by in school. And as the trio of outsiders band together, he begins to think he has a chance of helping his mother, too–by getting his new friends to help him discover the dark secret she is keeping from him…

Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen’s decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother’s twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen. Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America will haunt Helen for the rest of her life. This darkly beautiful novel about a child and a caretaker in isolation evokes shades of The Turn of the Screw and also harks back to Godwin’s memorable novel of growing up, The Finishing School. With its house on top of a mountain and a child who may be a bomb that will one day go off, Flora tells a story of love, regret, and the things we can’t undo. It will stay with readers long after the last page is turned.